Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases

Jeju Naval Business Committee: Construction set to be at the end of march, and construction for the Harbor and Bay to be started around June.

‘No Base Stories Of Korea’
March 4, 2010

The license for the reclamation of the public sea for the [planned] Jeju naval base, was given by the Busan Regional Maritime Affairs and Port Office and it is prospected that the setting for business [on the naval base construction] is to be done in the fist half of the year.

The Jeju naval base business committee, visiting the Island Hall press interview room on March 4, and saying, “The license for the basic plan, was given by the Busan Regional Maritime Affairs and Port Office” [*on the same request day of March 3, according to Seogwipo newspaper], announced that, “We will enter the procedure for the approval of realization plan in time [*on March 4, according to Seogwipo newspaper].”

The business committee’s plan is that, because all the conditions for construction of the harbor and bay are completed once the realization plan comes out at the end of March, it can set to work at latest in June, after
the preparatory period including such as installing the makeshift office.

The business committee saying, “ The navy headquarter is foreseeing the setting period as from the end of March when the related procedures would be finished by then and the office construction is started at the
site of the ceremony for the starting to work on the construction of the naval base”, elucidated that “We mean the June would be the time when the active construction for harbor and bay would be started.”

http://nobasestorieskorea.blogspot.com/2010/03/translation-fwd-construction-for-jeju.html

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honoluluadvertiser.com
By John Yaukey
January 27, 2010

Draft of 4-year plan suggests major impact on Isle bases

Boots on the ground will trump jets in the air or boats in the
water in the Pentagon’s forward-looking, four-year plan due out Monday
alongside the 2011 defense budget.

The Quadrennial Defense Review will recommend beefing up the Army and Marine
Corps, now stretched thin in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to a draft
version of the document.

Many of the cuts in expensive weapons have already started.

For Hawai’i and Guam — home to some of the most expensive conventional weapons the nation deploys, as well as to legions of foot soldiers — the report will have manifold consequences, although it’s not yet clear what they are.

The various military branches are expected to outline how they’ll be affected by the QDR and the proposed 2011 defense budget Monday.

The defense budget has been growing by an annual average of 4 percent, which would mean a $563 billion package for 2011, depending on whether it includes special funding for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

If included, the war funding could boost the overall request to $700 billion or more.

The Obama administration has said it wants to include war funding in the annual budget, rather than adding it in as needed, the way the Bush administration did.

“The defense budget is now more people-oriented,” said Loren Thompson, a top defense analyst with the Virginia-based Lexington Institute. “You’re going to see more emphasis on fighting unconventional warfare and less on weapons like aircraft carriers and bombers — more on people and less on equipment.”

www.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/20100127/NEWS01/1270348/Pentagon+s

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Tokyo (AFP)
By Kyoko Hasegawa
January 24, 2010

Japanese voters in a city on Okinawa island elected a mayor Sunday who opposes plans for a controversial new US air base, complicating a row with Washington over relocating troops.

Two candidates in Nago city were squaring off over whether or not to give local support to a plan — currently under review by the centre-left national government — to build a major new Marine Corps air base there.

Susumu Inamine, 64, who campaigned on a platform of rejecting the base, ousted Yoshikazu Shimabukuro, 63, with a more-than 1,500-strong majority.

Official figures showed nearly 77 percent turnout by the city’s 45,000 voters.

“I’ve run this election campaign with the pledge of not to build a base” in the coastal area of Nago city, Inamone told more than a hundred of his supporters who shouted and applauded in rapture. “I’ll keep to this campaign promise with firm conviction,” he said.

Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has said he may scrap an agreement with Washington to relocate the base from its current site in a crowded urban area of Okinawa to a quieter coastal site in the Nago area by 2014.

The issue has strained ties between Tokyo and Washington, which marked the 50th anniversary of their security pact last Tuesday, since Japan’s new leaders took power four months ago ending a half-century of conservative rule.

The southern island of Okinawa, which saw some of the bloodiest battles of World War II, hosts more than half of the 47,000 US troops in Japan.

While some local businesses benefit from the heavy American military presence, many residents have long opposed it, citing crimes committed by servicemen as well as noise, pollution and the threat of accidents. …

www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gFgXCe9Mb6wfGIUeSF8F_GhVPAAw

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Stars and Stripes
by Terry Weaver
January 17, 1010

The federal government has been slow to respond to Guam’s infrastructure requirements and public needs as the military looks to use the island to base at least 8,000 Marines Gov. Felix Camacho said Friday.

In the 3½ years since the expansion plans were announced, he said, many concerns have gone unanswered as Guam tries to secure money for transportation, water, sewage, landfill and other improvements needed to accommodate the influx of people and construction. …

Frustrations about the buildup — which could temporarily bring nearly 80,000 people to the island of 178,000 people — are mounting on Guam in the wake of the military’s public hearings on the massive project.

Repeated comments from young protesters at the hearings have swayed some public officials to ask for more time to study the proposal. Others, such as Sen. Judith Guthertz, have changed their positions on working with the military to secure more land on the island for the Marines’ base and a firing range. Bases currently sit on about a third of Guam’s 212 square miles.

Much of the land the military wants is controlled by the government of Guam, including some reserved for a homesteading program for native Chamorro families. …

www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=67275

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PRESS TV
January 7, 2010

Yemen’s government is to allow the US to set up a military base on its territory, a political analyst says.

The US can no longer rely on Yemen’s government to fight al-Qaeda because it is losing its legitimacy and becoming weaker, Ali Al-Ahmed, a political analyst, told Press TV on Wednesday.

Al-Ahmed added that his sources have revealed that the Yemeni government has decided to let the US military establish the air base on an island called Socotra located off the coast of Yemen.

According to the Saudi scholar, the island is a natural wildlife refuge. The information about the US air base will be made public in the next few weeks. …

www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=115536&sectionid=351020206

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Thai News Agency MCOT
January 3, 2010

The United States plans to fortify Guam, upgrading its military base on the island into a strategic staging post that would allow rapid access to potential flashpoints in the Pacific region.

More troops, including 9,182 Marines, army soldiers and their dependents from Okinawa, Japan, will be relocated to this island, while more than 9,000 transient troops, mainly from the navy’s carrier strike group, will also be based here.

The ”overarching purpose” of beefing up Guam as a military fortress is ”to provide mutual defense, deter aggression, and dissuade coercion in the Western Pacific Region, according to a draft impact report recently released by the U.S. Defense Department.

The proposed buildup would allow U.S. military forces to respond to regional threats and contingencies in a ”flexible” and ”timely manner” as they work to ”defend U.S., Japan and allied interests,” the study says.

”Moving these forces to Guam would place them on the furthest forward element of sovereign U.S. territory in the Pacific, thereby maximizing their freedom of action,” it says.

According to the report, the United States envisions Guam as a ”local command and control structure” manned, equipped, trained, and sustained by a modern logistics infrastructure.

The relocation and buildup cost, including expansion of infrastructure needed to maintain a permanent base for Marines and U.S. Army troops on Guam and Tinian, an island 160 kilometers to the northeast, is pegged at $12 billion.

Japan has agreed to chip in $6.09 billion of the total.

The plan would entail ”increased operational activities,” more frequent berthing by aircraft carriers and other warships, building aviation training ranges and upgrading of harbors, wharves and ports.

The existing Andersen Air Force Base on Guam would be expanded to include the air elements of the Marines. A new Marine base would be built ”right next door,” …

http://enews.mcot.net/view.php?id=13543

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Lew Rockwell
by Rick Rozoff

With senator and once almost vice president Joseph Lieberman’s threat on December 27 that “Yemen will be tomorrow’s war” and former Southern Command chief and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe Wesley Clark’s two days later that “Maybe we need to put some boots on the ground there,” [5] it is evident that America’s new war for the new year has already been identified. In fact in mid-December U.S. warplanes participated in the bombing of a village in northern Yemen that cost the lives of 120 civilians as well as wounding 44 more [6] and a week later “A US fighter jet…carried out multiple airstrikes on the home of a senior official in Yemen’s northern rugged province of Sa’ada….”

The pretext for undertaking a war in Yemen in earnest is currently the serio-comic “attempted terrorist attack” by a young Nigerian national on a passenger airliner outside of Detroit on Christmas Day. The deadly U.S. bombing of the Yemeni village mentioned above occurred ten days earlier and moreover was in the north of the nation, although Washington claims al-Qaeda cells are operating in the other end of the country.

Asia, Africa and the Middle East are not the only battlegrounds where the Pentagon is active. On October 30 of 2009 the U.S. signed an agreement with the government of Colombia to acquire the essentially unlimited and unrestricted use of seven new military bases in the South American nation, including sites within immediate striking distance of both Venezuela and Ecuador. [9] American intelligence, special forces and other personnel will be complicit in ongoing counterinsurgency operations against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in the nation’s south as well as in rendering assistance to Washington’s Colombian proxy for attacks inside Ecuador and Venezuela that will be portrayed as aimed at FARC forces in the two states.

Targeting two linchpins of and ultimately the entire Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), Washington is laying the groundwork for a potential military conflagration in South and Central America and the Caribbean. After the U.S.-supported coup in Honduras on June 28, that nation has announced it will be the first ALBA member state to ever withdraw from the Alliance and the Pentagon will retain, perhaps expand, its military presence at the Soto Cano Air Base there.

A few days ago “The Colombian government…announced it is building a new military base on its border with Venezuela and has activated six new airborne battalions” [10] and shortly afterward Dutch member of parliament Harry van Bommel “claimed that US spy planes are using an airbase on the Netherlands Antilles island of Curaçao” off the Venezuelan coast.

In October a U.S. armed forces publication revealed that the Pentagon will spend $110 million to modernize and expand seven new military bases in Bulgaria and Romania, across the Black Sea from Russia, where it will station initial contingents of over 4,000 troops.

In early December the U.S. signed a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Poland, which borders the Russian Kaliningrad territory, that “allows for the United States military to station American troops and military equipment on Polish territory.” The U.S. military forces will operate Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) and Standard Missile 3 (SM-3) batteries as part of the Pentagon’s global interceptor missile system.

At approximately the same time President Obama pressured Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to base missile shield components in his country. “We discussed the continuing role that we can play as NATO allies in strengthening Turkey’s profile within NATO and coordinating more effectively on critical issues like missile defense,” in the American leader’s words.

“Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has hinted his government does not view Tehran [Iran] as a potential missile threat for Turkey at this point. But analysts say if a joint NATO missile shield is developed, such a move could force Ankara to join the mechanism.”

2010 will see the first foreign troops deployed to Poland since the breakup of the Warsaw Pact in 1991 and the installation of the U.S.’s “stronger, swifter and smarter” (also Obama’s words) interceptor missiles and radar facilities in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the South Caucasus …

www.lewrockwell.com/orig10/rozoff4.1.1.html

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RIA Novosti
December 16, 2009

Turkey objects to plans of deploying U.S. missile defense elements on its soil because it could worsen relations with Russia and Iran, national media reported Wednesday.

According to Milliyet daily, U.S. President Barack Obama last week proposed placing a “missile shield” on Turkish soil.

“Both Russia and Iran will perceive that [deployment] as a threat,” a Turkish military source was quoted as saying.

U.S. President Barack Obama recently scrapped plans for Poland and the Czech Republic to host missile shield elements to counter possible strikes from Iran.

Due to a re-assessment of the threat for Iran, Washington announced a new scheme for a more flexible system, with a combination of land and sea-based interceptors based on the Standard Missile interceptor, SM-3.

Under the new plan, the U.S. would place ship-based SM-3s in the North and Mediterranean seas in 2011, and mobile land-based SM-3s in Central Europe by 2015.

The paper said “such technology will turn Turkey into a legitimate target for Iran’s medium and shorter range missiles.”

http://en.rian.ru/world/20091216/157260838.html

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Chicago Tribune
By Jason Grotto
December 9, 2009

… U.S. air bases in Vietnam remain highly polluted by defoliants, but the U.S. has done little to clean up the sites it contaminated during the war.

When a small Canadian environmental firm started collecting soil samples on a former U.S. air base in a remote Vietnam valley, Thomas Boivin and other scientists were skeptical they’d find evidence proving herbicides used there by the U.S. military decades ago still posed a health threat.

But results showed levels of the cancer-causing poison dioxin were far greater than guidelines set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for residential areas. …

Vancouver-based Hatfield Consultants began tracing the toxin through the food chain, from the soil and sediment of nearby ponds to the fat of ducks and fish to the blood and breast milk of villagers living on the contaminated site.

The breast milk of one woman from the study contained dioxin levels six times higher than what the World Health Organization deems safe. She also had a 2-year-old child with spina bifida, one of the birth defects for which the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs compensates the children of U.S. veterans.

Since then, Hatfield and Vietnamese scientists have taken samples from nearly 3,000 former U.S. military bases scattered throughout South Vietnam and identified 28 “hot spots,” including three highly contaminated sites around populated areas in Da Nang, Bien Hoa and Phu Cat.

Their findings offered a way to recast the legacy of Agent Orange in Vietnam as a solvable — and urgent — issue. Instead of a messy controversy over birth defects and other complex health issues, the discovery of persistent contamination focused attention on a measurable, present-day problem that could be addressed.

Yet since the first Hatfield study was published in 2000, the U.S. government has done little to help clean up the sites it contaminated during the Vietnam War, providing just $6 million to tackle both the serious health issues related to the contamination and the significant environmental damage caused by the defoliants. …

www.chicagotribune.com/health/agentorange/chi-agent-orange4dec09,0,7839395.story

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